Review: This Daddy ain’t cool!

Daddy Cool
Director: K Murali Mohan Rao
Cast: Sunil Shetty, Aftab Shivdasani, Javed Jaffrey, Rajpal Yadav and others
Rating: * 1/2

By now we all know that Daddy Cool is the official remake of British film Death at a Funeral. The producers have bought rights for the remake, which is praiseworthy by Bollywood standards.

So the sets are identical, the actors wear the same clothes (they even stand in the same order they did in the original) and the dialogues are a direct translation most of the times.

Comedy is never that funny the second time. But considering that few Indians would have seen the low-budget original (it got a limited release here and has only recently started playing on English movie channels), you may think it makes sense to remake it for Indian audiences. But when the result is Daddy Cool, it doesn’t. Irrespective of whether you’ve seen the original, Daddy Cool is NOT funny.

There’s a dead man, just like in the original. The film’s plot unfolds over a few hours at his funeral, once again. This gives the makers a chance not to exercise their grey cells much and dress every character just like in the original — in black suits and dresses.

Names like Carlos, Michael, Steven and Nancy are thrown at you every two seconds. Among the few times you laugh is when Rajpal Yadav introduces himself as Andrew Symonds, but that’s hardly a respite.

As if to justify the Christian characters, the story is set in Goa. It’s another thing that the only scene in the film where you see a street was probably shot in Juhu. The characters are obviously dysfunctional; that’s how you get the few laughs. But none of them manages to make you guffaw consistently.

British black comedies don’t usually work beyond the UK, not even in the US, where the English-speaking audience is much larger than in India. Although Death at a Funeral did well there (a Hollywood remake with Chris Rock, Martin Lawrence and Luke Wilson is in the wings), to make an identical remake of such a film in India was foolhardy.

An adaptation, where the story was tweaked to suit Indian sensibilities, could have been better. The funniest scenes in the film, incidentally, are the ones that have been thought of by the makers, although these are very few.

Producers Indra Kumar and Ashok Thakeria have a penchant for comedies and a little work to make the screenplay more palatable could have made the film a laugh riot. Sadly, that’s not the case here.

But all's not lost. One plus of the film being similar to the original is that it’s also as short. So if you have 90 minutes to kill, and don’t mind doing it in an air-conditioned cinema hall while getting a few laughs in return, go watch Daddy Cool.

On second thoughts, renting a DVD of the original would be less expensive — and more fun.